Indited
by Sparkly Faerie
Summary: She's never been more grateful to live alone. That way, no one sees her clutch her diary to her chest as she begins to weep.


**Why do I keep torturing myself?**

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**Disclaimer: **I do not own Doctor Who or anything associated with it. All rights to Doctor Who and affiliated products belong to the BBC and the other proper entities.

**Summary:** She's never been more grateful to live alone. That way, no one sees her clutch her diary to her chest as she begins to weep.

**Rating:** K

**Genre:** Romance/Angst

**Warnings:** None.

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**Indited**

She's never been more grateful to live alone.

It's been happening more and more, now. She's been seeing older versions of the Doctor in between meeting his younger incarnations—he comes every night and takes her away for days, _weeks_ at a time, almost like he's trying to squeeze in as much time together as possible. She tries to tell herself that the thought is ridiculous. She knows, of course, that she is getting into the extremely early days in his timeline—can see it in the brown eyes of his previous incarnation. He barely knows her.

Given that, these trips with his much older counterpart should, she thinks, be a godsend. But there's something in his eyes that gives her pause.

She knows that he's not foolish enough not to have noticed that she's noticed. He wont insult her by trying to hide it, either, but neither can she bring herself to ask. Of course, he's still her lovable, doddering old Doctor. Her husband, her lover, her friend. He still takes her to exotic places and times and gets them in and out of trouble almost as easily as breathing. But she senses that he's counting.

They are running out of time.

When she was younger, she'd never really given much thought to the end. It had existed in the far-off future: Decades, maybe even centuries away.

Now, she's spent almost all of her time, and all she wants is to go back to the beginning to start again.

She's about to start penning an entry into her diary—her ancient, falling-apart-at-the-seams diary that he'd given to her so long ago, the day she'd killed and cured him with a kiss. This book, she thinks, running her fingers over the faded blue cover, has seen so much. Has seen births and deaths; worlds-that-never-were; timelines that history forgot; the rise and fall of whole empires. It's seen, she likes to think, one of the most all-encompassing and impossible love stories that the Universe has ever known.

When she's gone, she hopes the Doctor matches her entries up with the ones in his own diary, and she hopes that he likes how he sees their story from her eyes.

For now, she clutches her pen and flips to a blank page near the end, the edges frayed, yellow and water damaged. When she'd started keeping this diary, it had been with the assumption that they would one day come full circle, and that they would occasionally pull out and compare their old stories, laughing over them as they whizzed through time and space.

Now, she writes as if she's telling a story. And, in reality, she is. One day, she thinks, she will be gone, and this diary will be all that the Doctor will have left of her. One day, maybe quite soon, he will trace the letters on these pages with a fingertip, maybe shed a few tears as he learns to see himself as she sees him. He will finally, _finally_, know the complete truth of the entity that was Professor River Song, born Melody Pond, raised as a weapon and loved as dearly as if she were the most precious treasure in the whole of Creation.

She writes her entry, taking care to use her best handwriting—the Doctor often complained in her early days that her handwriting was atrocious. She wants him to be able to read every word, doesn't want a syllable lost to him due to shoddy penmanship. She catalogues the fierce beauty of the Addysian Thunder Storm, raging as it had for a thousand years. The purple clouds and the green lightning, the way the light from the sun on the horizon had caught the rain and cast rainbows all over the surface of the planet for as far as the eye could see.

She writes about how she loves views like this best from the circle of his arms.

She doesn't write anything about the pain in his eyes.

"The next time I see you," he'd promised her, "I'll take you to see Darillium."

She's wanted to go for years, and he knows it. Now, seeing the look that it puts on his face as he says the words, she wonders if she really wants to go at all.

But still, she tells herself as she finishes her entry and puts her pen down on the table, time stands still for no man. Not even a lonely old man who's suffered all of the heartache in the world and then some. Not even for his wife—an impossible thing in and of herself, who had once tried to force it to do exactly that.

As much as she loves spending time with the Doctor, she's grateful that she has her empty flat to come home to. That way, no one sees her stricken face as she turns off the lights.

No one sees her clutch her diary to her chest as she begins to weep, sitting alone and in the dark.

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The last time she writes anything in her diary, it's a note to her husband.

His younger self is handcuffed to the wall not five feet away, unconscious. She knows she should be wiring up the headpiece, but she _needs_ to take these few moments to leave a message for her beloved—she will say goodbye to this much younger version of him, of course. But her _real_ goodbyes are for the man that saw her to her door four nights ago with the saddest smile she'd ever seen and tears running down his face, tangling his fingers in her riotous curls for the last time and holding her as if she were the most precious thing he'd ever seen.

Her heart breaks as she closes the book for the very last time.

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He doesn't read it for months. Can't bring himself to. He's lost too many people, and reading the last page of her diary will only mean that it's completely, well and truly, over. And he just… he can't lose River, too.

When he finally turns the page, he can still see the marks her tears had left on the paper. He presses a finger to one and puts it to his lips. If he tries really, really hard, he imagines that he can taste the salt of her tears, even after all this time.

His eyes devour the last words she had ever written. When he's finished, he slowly closes the book and buries his face in his hands.

His shoulders heave as the warm, salty tears spill through his fingertips, landing on the closed cover of the diary in his lap.

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_My dear, dear Doctor,_

_There is so much I want to say, but I don't have the time. I wish I'd known from the start how precious our time was together—perhaps, then, I could have spent it a little more wisely._

_I don't blame you, sweetie. You did everything in your power. But I would much rather have lived and loved you, even with all the pain and heartbreak in the Universe, than have gone a single lifetime without ever meeting you at all._

_I want you to do one thing for me: Do not dwell on me, my love. I want you to go on and be happy. I know it hurts right now, but this too shall pass. I hope that one day I am a happy memory that lives on in your thoughts, as a period of warmth and happiness and love, when you look back on our time together._

_I don't want you to be alone. Find someone. If you can do one thing for me, my darling Doctor, then please; do this._

_I love you. Never forget that._

_-River. x_

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**This is what happens when I read depressing fanfiction all afternoon.**

**Thanks for reading, reviews are love!**

**~Sparkly Faerie**


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